Screenshot Tour: Process Explorer 12 is now out

Process Explorer is one of the staples of the hard-core Windows geek. It's a Task Manager replacement which does so much more; some would say it does too much. It's produced by Microsoft-acquired Sysinternals, which have been making some of the best in-depth system utilities for Windows even before Microsoft bought them out (years ago).

My favorite feature in the new update is that I can now hover the mouse over any "svchost.exe" entry and get a whole list of services running under that process ("Group Policy", "Task Scheduler", etc.). That's very useful for trying to narrow down on what specific service is taking resources, even though a single svchost process can contain several services.

However, the new update is not without bugs, apparently. When testing it, the Find feature simply did not work, and even caused it to freeze on my system. You can see what that looked like (plus other screenshots), after the jump.

[via: CybernetNews]

The process tree is the main part of the program; no real news here, but in case you've never used Process Explorer before, this is the "meat and potatoes" part. You can easily see the differences between this and Task Manager.

This is the tooltip you get when you hover over an "svchost.exe" process. You can see exactly what services are running under that process, using human-readable names.

Another neat feature (not new to this release) is the "Search Online" command. You select a process and hit Ctrl-M (or select the menu item), and it Googles the process name for you in your default browser. Handy for quickly figuring out if something is malware or not.

And now for some of the things which I find less enjoyable: This is what happened when I executed a Find command; it's supposed to look for a process name or handle (and I did have a process by that name). Instead, it just froze completely ...

To the point Windows wanted to kill it:

And the lower pane, which may be handy for some, is a good example for "too much information", or maybe "inadequate display of information". While it certainly is handy to know what are the events or open file handles of any given process, there has to be a better way of showing this information - a huge list isn't very usable. Maybe we can hope for something better on this in future releases.

Tags: microsoft, sysadmin, sysinternals, system, utilities, windows